2010 association for the sociology of religion...

2010 Association for the Sociology ofReligion Presidential Address

Creating an American Islam: Thoughtson Religion, Identity, and Place

Rhys H. Williams*Loyola University Chicago

I begin with the premise that there is an American Islam being created—a version of the faiththat aligns with the contemporary United States both organizationally and culturally. This faithformation is connected to the immigration of Muslims to the United States since the 1965changes in immigration laws, even though Muslims have been in the United States, especiallyamong African Americans, much longer than that. Two sets of social forces are creating thisAmerican Islam: the lived religious practices of the second and third generations of these post-1965 families; and the imposed images of Islam and institutional constraints of civil societycoming from major social institutions and native-born Americans. The interaction of these“bottom up” and “top down” dynamics can be illuminated by an understanding of “place” inboth social and geographical terms.

Key words: Islam; American religion; immigration; place; sacred space; religious identity.

Just as, at one time, there was a debate about “Americanism” withinRoman Catholicism, there are now people who would argue against the veryidea of an “American Islam.” Some are North American non-Muslimsenamored of some version of the “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996)argument, or those who are committed to a normative ideal of a “ChristianAmerica” (Wuthnow 2006). In ironic agreement, some in radical Islamiccircles either deny that the development of an American Islam is

*Direct correspondence to Rhys H. Williams, Department of Sociology, Loyola UniversityChicago, 1032 W. Sheridan Rd., Chicago, IL 60660, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

# The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Associationfor the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:[email protected].

Sociology of Religion 2011, 72:2 127-153doi:10.1093/socrel/srr022

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happening, arguing that all Islam is one and there are no cultural variations,or they believe that it is happening and find it a regrettable degeneration ofthe true faith. Another response is to claim that an “American Islam” isnot a recent development, as there have been Muslims in this country forgenerations. In particular, there has been a significant African AmericanMuslim population in the United States, both in the distinctly U.S. form ofthe Nation of Islam and in more orthodox manifestations, for decades(Smith 2010). This has led to an ideal typical distinction in the scholarlyworld that studies Muslims in the United States that differentiates between“indigenous” and “immigrant” Islam, largely along racial lines (Khabeer2007; Leonard 2007).

But the mere existence of Muslims in the United States is not the con-ceptual equivalent of an “American Islam.” The latter evokes a religiouslyauthentic and culturally legitimate faith that exists relatively unproblemati-cally within its societal context, in the United States as part of the estab-lished religious mosaic. Thus, despite the existence of Muslims in Americafor some time, I argue that a truly American Islam is a product of thesecond and third generations of post-1965 “new” immigrants and is currentlyin formation. This development is due in part to the rapidly increasingnumbers of these post-1965 families, and in part because many of thesecond and third generations now have the education and middle-classstatus to begin to make claims on, and demand respect from, the Americanpublic sphere. American Muslim communities increasingly have the resour-ces to found and develop religious and social service institutions (Haddad2009) that help, in turn, to organize these resources. Further, the UnitedStates has both a history of priding itself on religious diversity and a signifi-cant cultural strain that now celebrates “multiculturalism” (Kurien 2007;Wuthnow 2006). And, not insignificantly, American Islam has now capturedsignificant scholarly, literary, cultural, and political attention. In sum,American Islam is getting harder for all Americans to avoid, as opposed towhen its existence was an isolated family or locked within racially segregatedAfrican American communities.1

A look at several recent book covers from scholarly volumes on Islam inthe United States shows the extent to which this topic is engaged, especiallyin scholarly writings, based on recent immigrants from Arab and South Asiancountries (figures 1–3). Note that the photographs focus on people who

1There is active engagement between some in African-American Muslim communitiesand some in post-1965 immigrant Muslim communities as to what are appropriate practices,legal traditions, and cultural habits for Muslims in the United States. This engagement hasbeen both cooperative and marked by tension, often along race and class lines. Khabeer(2007), Leonard (2003, 2007), and Smith (2010) all address this. My concern here is cen-tered more on how Islam is coming to visibility, consciousness, and legitimacy within thegeneral American public sphere and its religious pluralism—a dynamic that is the result ofthe numbers and resources of the post-1965 immigrants and their children.

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appear to be of either Arab or South Asian origin, signaled either by skin coloror clothing, and the dearth of African Americans. I do note that the cover ofYvonne Yazbeck Haddad’s seminal 1993 book The Muslims of America(figure 3) does work to show the variety among Muslims. But even in this pho-tograph, Africans or African Americans are a distinct minority. And, as iscommon, the hijab headscarf for women functions as perhaps the dominantphysical symbol of Islamic identity and a visible reminder of the potential dis-ruption between Islam and the American “main street” (for other evidence ofthe ubiquity of the hijab in representations of Muslims, see Williams and Vashi2007). Each of these book covers emphasizes, perhaps unintentionally, the dis-tance between Muslims in the United States and Anglo-Saxon middleAmerica (often through juxtaposition, as in figure 2).

Many other examples could be provided, such as the booklet “BeingMuslim in America” (2009), published by the Bureau of InternationalInformation Programs in the U.S. State Department. The cover photoshows two young women playing basketball, one in a standard basketballuniform while the other is dressed in hijab with long sleeves and longpants under her uniform (interestingly, both young women are Muslim—

FIGURE 1. Muslim Women in America, by Haddad et al., Oxford University Press, 2006. # Oxford

University Press, New York, NY. Used by permission of the Press.

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Arab Americans from the Detroit area).2 In all, however, AfricanAmerican Muslims remain underrepresented in our dominant public imagesof Islam in the United States, as African Americans remain underrepre-sented in our politics, culture, and media generally. However, this focus onrecent immigrants as the most visible representation of Islam in the UnitedStates is sometimes uncomfortable for Muslims themselves. For example, apost-9/11 public-service ad campaign sponsored by Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) titled “I am an American Muslim” featuredseveral people who emphasized that their families had been in this countryfor generations—deliberately unhooking American Islam from recent immi-gration (Alsultany 2007).

But if we are to think about an American Islam as a religious form that hasa significant place in the public sphere, that becomes a player in community and

FIGURE 2. Mecca and Main Street, by Abdo, Oxford University Press, 2006. # Oxford University

Press, New York, NY. Used by permission of the Press.

2It is significant to note that all of the books pictured here are fundamentally sympa-thetic to religious pluralism and encourage the idea of Islam as a culturally legitimate reli-gion in the U.S. Books hostile to Islam, of course, almost invariably use cover art thatdramatizes the differences between Muslims and “America.”


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perhaps national politics, and that becomes a significant and widely perceivedpresence in the American religious mosaic, we must focus our attention on thereligion being crafted—on the ground and in community-based organizations—by second and third generations of post-1965 immigrants, and how that inter-acts with the imposed images, stereotypes, and understandings of the largernon-Muslim American population. This essay explores what this empiricalstory tells us about religion, its interactions with “identity” as a socialand public phenomenon, and “place,” conceptualized both socially andgeographically.

THE “AMERICANIZATION” OF ISLAM

One can discuss the “Americanization” of Islam in both organizational andcultural terms. There are several organizational features that are widely regardedas being distinctive about American religion. Many consider a congregationalstructure and a “community center” model of social service delivery tomembers as distinctly “American” (e.g., Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Warner

FIGURE 3. The Muslims of America, by Haddad, Oxford University Press, 1993. # Oxford

University Press, New York, NY. Used by permission of the Press.


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1994) religious forms, particularly when this emerges among communities ofimmigrants. The crux of this organizational form is the basic reality ofAmerican religious institutions as locally organized and ultimately responsiveto local members. These members finance, build, incorporate, administer, andpopulate religious institutions. In doing so, they are in control of their own reli-gious lives (one area of life where recent immigrants actually may be incontrol) and can revel in home cultures and familiar ways. This is a dominantfinding coming from most of the scholarship on recent immigrant religion inthe United States (e.g., Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Kurien 2007; Min 2010;Warner and Wittner 1998; Yang 1999).

Importantly, the extent to which these immigrant associations are formallyorganized they are also necessarily brought as much into contact with—perhaps brought more into contact with—American political and civil author-ities, and with non-Muslim neighbors and civic and business organizations, asthey are with other Muslim organizations and translocal Islamic religiousauthorities. Organizing a local Islamic center does not require the imprimaturof the world-wide Islamic community, or a national Muslim ecclesial author-ity—but it does require negotiating with the zoning board, local contractors,health and safety inspectors, those who control local traffic ordinances andparking restrictions. Because of this, it is not surprising that immigrant religiousinstitutions are often the gateways to wider civic engagement (Foley and Hoge2007; Kniss and Numrich 2007). It may well be that in many parts of theworld, the mosque is a fundamentally locally organized and administered insti-tution,3 but it certainly helps facilitate the adaptation of Islam to Americanreligious dynamics.

In this way, Islam is well suited to take advantage of American civil soci-ety’s Tocquevillian dimensions (particularly compared with Hinduism orBuddhism, see Williams 2007), precisely because it has an organizational formthat can be adapted to the “congregation” as a unit, and is less reliant on trans-local or transnational ecclesiastical religious authority. Certainly manymosques hire imams from Pakistan or the Middle East to serve here—but theseimams are usually most adept at religious instruction, and are often not theadministrative leaders of mosques, Islamic schools, etc. I have met imams whowere barely able to handle English—which may not be an issue for Qur’aniceducation, but makes dealing with civic authorities much more difficult. Theform of the imam-led masjid is less common in my experience (and in the liter-ature that considers the issue; e.g., Bagby 2004; Unus 2004) than aPresident-led or board-led mosque. While the ulama are revered in Islam, thefaith is also in many ways a lay-driven religion and thus lends itself to self-organizing in the United States.

3A point made to me by Fred Kniss about Muslim populations in East Africa andIndia.


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When established in this country, the Islamic Center is as much a culturaland educational center as place of worship, as the institutions usually include alarge community hall and have room for things such as cultural programs, reli-gious education (often literally a Sunday school), wedding parties, and the like.There are spaces for Muslims to congregate socially as well as pray, in ways thatare not often typical of mosques in traditionally Islamic countries. It is impor-tant to note that it is an organizational adaptation when masjids become “con-gregations” in the United States (Abusharaf 1998). This process includes theformalization of governance structures, developing a concept of “membership”in a particular local congregation, and the professionalization of organizationalleadership (clergy as well as boards of directors).

Islam’s organizational structure is thus resonant with the “de facto congre-gationalism” (Warner 1994) that marks much of American religion, and thoseinstitutional pressures push Islam further in that adaptive direction. There aretranslocal Islamic organizations, such as the Islamic Society of North America(ISNA) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), as well as attendantoff-shoots such as the Muslim Youth of North America—the youth program-ming branch of ISNA. These organizations function much the way thatdenominations do for congregationally organized Christian groups in theUnited States (such as the UCC or Baptists), that is, they act as a resource forprogramming and a sponsor of regular conventions—not as a structure of eccle-siastical religious authority with the capacity to discipline local organizations(see Chaves 1998). Moreover, they are not sources of financial support orsponsorship for local organizations—local masjids or Islamic centers must beself-sufficient, supported by local populations.

In this regard, it is interesting to note that ISNA itself developed out ofthe Muslim Student Association (MSA). The MSA was first founded in1963—before the 1965 changes in immigration law. It was founded by and foryoung Muslims who were in the United States as students, and who could notfind any real fellowship either among existing communities of AfricanAmerican Muslims, or among the relatively small numbers of Arab andPakistani Muslim communities scattered around the country. As the MSA onthe East Coast got larger, and as many students graduated and stayed on in theUnited States, an MSA morphed into ISNA. In that organizational sense, onecan truly say that “American Islam was born in the MSA.” This is both acomment about social space, but also a significant point about geographicspace and settlement patterns to which I will return.

Bakalian and Bozorgmehr (2009) argue that Islam is coming of age inthe United States and credit, with appreciation for the irony of unintendedconsequences, the events of 9/11 for the emergence of an American Islam.Their claim is that the backlash against Muslim Americans (and others ofMiddle Eastern origin) was serious enough in both civil society (such ashate crimes) and in governmental “war-on-terror” policies that it sparked amobilization of activity, energy, and claims-making by a significant number


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of civil society non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) organized around Muslim and Middle Easternconcerns. Thus, groups such as the CAIR and the Muslim Public AffairsCouncil (MPAC) stepped up to take more public and visible roles asdefenders and interpreters of Muslims in America, and they have becomemore effective and professionalized in the process. Indeed, Bakalian andBorzorgmehr’s tale of 9/11 backlash and a similar one from Cainkar (2009)actually have a hopeful thread running through them to a surprisinglyupbeat conclusion—that both despite and because of the backlash and diffi-culties of recent events, Islam is becoming more civically engaged and more“American” as a result (a point also made by Bilici 2011). This is not todispute the seriousness of the backlash (see also Peek 2011). Participants inthe anti-Islamic backlash certainly dispute that Islam can be trulyAmerican; but the argument of this essay is that such resistance is in thelong run a losing effort (see also Williams 2010).

Bakalian and Bozorgmehr’s analysis of the organizational response to 9/11and its aftermath is convincing. In the long run of the history of Americansociety and the incorporation of Islam, 9/11 will be a chapter, and not “the daythat changed everything forever.” Without in the least minimizing the fearand discrimination that many American Muslims continue to experience since9/11—and without minimizing the extent to which some elements inAmerican political culture work hard at the “othering” of Islam and questionwhether Muslims can be good Americans—American consumer culture hashistorically been a solvent on traditional identities, American religious culturehas historically fostered and facilitated hybrid practices and identities, and his-torically new immigrant populations have had remarkable creative capacities intheir efforts to find a workable accommodation within this expansive society.Many groups before immigrant Muslims have ended up having to work veryhard at resisting too much assimilation into Anglo-conformity—it is not clearwhy it should be that much different for the educated, middle-class second,third, and fourth generations of Muslims.

Along with the organizational story of institutional adaptation, there arecultural dimensions of the development of American Islam that I have seenrepeatedly during recent research; these cultural practices represent a lived,on-the-ground construction of a genuinely American religious option. Fosteredwithin self-organized, voluntary associations that provide social support, reli-gious education, and invariably, connections to American civil society, is a setof meaning-creating practices by second- and third-generation Muslims thatwill be the heart of an American Islam. As masjids become cultural centers,the culture being incubated is often a matter of “living on the hyphen.”

This is particularly true for second-generation non-Christians—who arenegotiating the divide between their parents’ culture and the dominant culturethat is represented by their non-co-religionist college peers, or by mass media,the culture of higher education, political institutions, and the like. One of my


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students at Loyola University refers to himself and his peers as “T-C-Ks”—“third culture kids.” Many of these young people have found a quintessentialAmerican form—the religious voluntary association—where they can expresstheir fidelity to their religious tradition as well as work out the interpretationsof that faith that allow them to live smoothly among age peers. The intersec-tion of organization and public identity is a particular social space, and usuallyaccompanied by a physical space as well.

THE SECOND GENERATION

My evidence for the grassroots creation of American Islam comes fromdata gathered on second-generation Muslims and Islamic religious organizationsthrough the Youth and Religion Project (YRP), a collaborative projectbetween myself and R. Stephen Warner of the University of Illinois, Chicago.We have gathered data on a number of different populations of youth andyoung adults: white, black, and Latino Christians—both Protestant andCatholic—and Hindus and Muslims. We did interviews with individuals(mostly college students) and with focus groups (divided by gender and faithtradition, and sometimes ethnicity/race). Further, we attended worship services,classes, and youth activities at religious organizations that cater to, or were runby, or seemed to attract, youth. For the research on Muslims, we spent time atseveral different masjids and Islamic Centers (two in particular), and visitedseveral Islamic schools. In particular, I followed one organization of college-ageMuslims who do community organizing work in inner-city neighborhoods, andone MSA at a metropolitan university. We were in the field both before andafter 9/11. One of the orienting concerns of the research was how youngpeople use religious organizations—many of them organizations they them-selves start or run—to help organize a public identity—presumably one that iscoherent with their personal and spiritual identities.

Some images from my fieldwork continue to stand out to me. First,I remember talking at one MSA meeting with a young Muslim woman who isdressed in both hijab (the head-covering scarf) and jilbab (the long, flowing,shapeless robe). Her cell phone rang, she answered, chatted excitedly inEnglish mixed with Arabic, and pulled out another electronic device that con-tained her calendar to arrange a study meeting for one of her pre-med classes.Here, in the Islamic garb that is often a public symbol, to many Americans atleast, of female modesty and submissiveness—was an educated young womanwith professional ambitions and the latest in technology. What is more, shewas talking with me—an unrelated male—openly and directly, and had, withher cousins, driven her own car to this meeting.

A second salient memory came from participating in a neighborhoodclean-up day in an inner-city neighborhood, sponsored by a young adult rungroup called Southside Islamic Neighborhood Organization (SINO). We


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worked—in gender-segregated teams that included young women in hijabwielding shovels, rakes, and paint brushes—while a stereo and huge speakersblared music pulsating with hip-hop beats. The music and rhythms were pureurban America, while the lyrics told stories from the hadith, the HebrewScriptures, and Islamic history. At the end of the CD, a recorded message indi-cated the music is part of the “Islamic Rap” series put out by the MuslimYouth of North America (MYNA)—a national division of ISNA that sponsorsyouth activities and offers youth resources to Islamic groups (see also Khabeer2007). In each of these examples, it was a thoroughly Muslim setting, but in somany ways it could not have been more “American.” And my field notesabound with similar stories—such as the time I went to a suburban mosque toobserve their Qur’an classes. One teacher, an elderly Pakistani man who spokevirtually no English, brought forward his star pupils to do recitations for me—one young man who was about a junior or senior in high school wearing aChicago Bulls t-shirt, another about the same age in a high school footballjersey, a third boy of about 10 or 11 in a New York Yankees baseball cap.

There is more evidence of the ways that the second generation is forgingan American Islamic identity through an examination of books about young

FIGURE 4. The American Muslim Teenager’s Handbook (second edition), by Hafiz et al.,

Antheneum, 2009. # Mark Peterman; used by permission of Mark Peterman Photography;

www.markpeterman.com.


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American Muslims written by these young people themselves. The books’cover photographs often show mixtures of classically American cultural images(such as the Statue of Liberty, or the national flag) with some symbols of thefaith or as background to the book title. Other book covers work assiduously topresent thoroughly “mainstream” images of the authors, and of AmericanMuslim young people (figures 4–6).

For example, in figure 4, there is a young man, relaxed and with a guitar,behind an uncovered young woman. This cover is on the successful secondedition of the book, published by a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster. The firstedition, published by Acacia Press in Gilbert, Arizona, had a different coverdesign featuring four “head shots” of teenagers, two female, one with hijab theother without, and two of males, one of which shows relatively fair-skinnedboys in what look like athletic uniforms. If anything, the imagery of the secondedition shows even fewer of the juxtapositions common among the academicbook covers. In figure 6, Sumbul Ali-Karamali presents herself as “the Muslimnext door”—integrating herself into the imagery of the archetypical Americanneighborhood, and paraphrasing the colloquial expression for someone who isthoroughly “normal” and “All-American.” Asma Gull Hasan, the author ofAmerican Muslims: The Next Generation (2000) and other books, grew up in

FIGURE 5. Americans Muslims, by Hasan, Continuum Books, 2000. # Continuum Press,

New York, NY. Used by permission of the Press.


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Pueblo, Colorado, is pictured with her skis (figure 5), and describes herself as a“Muslim Feminist cowgirl” (3)—a label she proudly says she invented.

Images on a selection of book covers can be over-interpreted, as much moregoes into them than just an author’s intention. But book covers are meant bothto communicate a book’s message and catch potential customers’ eyes by usingfamiliar symbols and occasional juxtapositions. They do contain a message, atthe very least about the publishers’ perceptions of the target market. In any case,the relative differences between the academic books on Islam, that seem tothrive on the juxtaposition of Muslim identity and non-Muslim contexts, andthese books coming from non-academic American Muslim authors, and whichseem to emphasize a nonproblematic integration, is striking. It illustrates againthat the creation of an American Islam is happening at the intersection ofon-the-ground practices of people who are negotiating a public identity with thesymbolic boundaries of a larger cultural imaginary.

Clearly the social and cultural situation of “living on the hyphen” requiresa significant amount of “identity work” for those involved, and it can be verystressful (Sirin and Fine 2008). Nonetheless this cultural work is creating thepractical, lived expressions of American Islam; it is happening largely in organ-izational settings that young Muslims find comfortable. Two factors are impor-tant in facilitating this process of negotiating American society whileremaining authentically Muslim—things that appeared repeatedly and consis-tently in the settings I observed. First is the emphasis put on religious educationat every formal gathering of Muslim youth. Second is the extent to whichbeing publicly Muslim offers youth a counter-cultural identity that let them

FIGURE 6. The Muslim Next Door, by Ali-Karamali, White Cloud Press, 2008. # White Cloud

Press, Ashland, Oregon. Used by permission of the Press.


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know where they stand and who they are through the process of identitythrough distinction. The latter seems particularly true post-9/11, even as thatcontext presents challenges to young American Muslims.

These two factors are intertwined and complement each other. Of course,much religious education happens because of the work of religiously observantparents who take their children to prayer services, make sure they get religiousinstruction in “Sunday schools,” or send them to summer camps. An examplecomes from one of our interviews:

R(espondent): [At] Sunday school . . . they teach 4 classes. One is about the history of theProphet, one is about the Qur’an where you memorize and you learn about the meaning of itand how to interpret it and stuff like that. One is actually a class on how to actually read theQur’an properly and one is a class on theology. Basic concepts and rules and how to pray.Stuff like that.

Or from another respondent:

I(nterviewer): [Y]ou had mentioned you go to [summer] camps?R: [F]rom when I was young, I’d go to camps. Actually, I think my brother started

going at 5 [years old]. I started going at 7. . . . [B]ack then, it was just the parents would gettogether and they’d organize a camp and they’d . . . run the camp. . . . I think the first campI attended full-time . . . was at 13. . . . [T]here were 200 people there and it was actually areally intense camp.

I: How was it intense?R: Like there’s just a lot knowledge that was thrown out and there’s a lot—you build a

brotherhood, you build a sisterhood. You learn a whole lot about things.I: You see others like you—R: Yeah. And these are like nationwide and continental camps. So you’d make friends

with people all over the United States and Canada. So literally, right now I can pretty muchgo to any city in the U.S. and find a place to stay without a problem.

Alongside these reports of formal religious education sponsored by families,set in mosques or at a summer camp, I repeatedly saw examples of religious edu-cation even when attending regular meetings of youth-run groups. SINO heldmonthly members’ meetings to plan both service and social activities; thesealways included a Dars, a half-hour talk on a religious or ethical theme, oftenfrom an age-peer who was treated like a respected “elder” due to his (in myexperience, always “his”) knowledge about Islam. In an almost 1970s-style con-sciousness raising, young adults educate themselves in the faith, and work outhow to be Muslims in a non-Muslim society. For example, from my fieldnotestaken at one of SINO’s monthly membership meetings:

At one point in the discussion of the . . . site [where the group was doing service work], the[Euro-American] woman convert asked if she could get an “Islamic opinion” as to whether“women can do this work.” She had worked at that location in the past and wanted to do soagain, but wanted to know if it was acceptable Islamically. The question produced some con-fusion among the men (the meeting moderator and the current group President). They askedher to elaborate on why this might be problematic, she continued to ask the question in the


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same words. The men turned to the man who later delivered the Dars, who thought briefly,then said to follow the “conventional wisdom.” No one seemed to know what the conventionalwisdom was, so they tossed the ball back to him. He considered the Prophet’s concern withthe safety and protection of women, versus the benefits of the work being done. At this point,one of the late arriving men sort of burst in and said, “so it’s cost–benefit analysis.” [I didnot think that was quite what was being said—I thought the tenor was that any cost at allmight make the situation unacceptable.] Others sort of disagreed that it was quite so simple[not so much, I thought, because they understood what the “conventional wisdom” was, butbecause the outburst seemed rude]. This exchange went on for a while, not really beingresolved, until the moderator wanted to move on.

Obviously, this is not always a smooth process. But this example showsboth on-going religious education and the development and expression of a dis-tinctly “Muslim” social identity among youth. These efforts at education andclarification continue through the crucial “identity moment” of young adult-hood. The Euro-convert is a particularly clear example of self-conscious iden-tity work, but I witnessed many debates and discussions among people tryingto tease out Islamic legal principles and apply them to their particular life prac-tices. It seemed particularly vibrant when young people were immersed ingroups of age peers (for some young Muslims, college is their first time theyhave a significant peer circle of nonfamily Muslims).

The life practices they are trying to negotiate, of course, are in the UnitedStates, a societal and cultural context that is not always welcoming and for whichtheir parents, and many formal religious authorities, cannot provide much guid-ance. Many young American Muslims have wide differences in experience andknowledge with their parents, and as a result, many of their parents’ social andcultural lessons are not very relevant to them (this is not uncommon for thesecond generation; see Min 2010). Many young people report that their parents—while culturally traditionalist—are lax or secularized in their religious practice:

R: My parents, my family has always been Muslim by culture which I mean . . . is notalways very valid because I don’t believe that . . . that God considers you a Muslim or aChristian or a Jew based on your blood or . . . something that you inherit. I believe . . . youhave to make a conscious decision. And so, at first, I think my parents were Muslim byculture. . . . [I]t wasn’t until much later in life—my mother didn’t begin covering until prob-ably in her early 30s. . . . I started [at] 16, 17 years old. And this is something—this is ageneral thing in any Muslim family. So I think there’s been like a, you know, a rise in aware-ness. Islamic awareness, in my own generation compared to my parents’ generation.

Part of this “rise in awareness” comes from the continuing emphasis on reli-gious education. There is widespread ability to quote Suras from the Qur’an, orto provide theological explanations for Islamic practices and holidays. Even inthose cases where young people do not have the necessary knowledge, thoseare still the terms within which things are discussed. This rise in awareness iswithin an American culture where religion is an achieved status—attainedafter a conscious, deliberate decision, not a birthright or ethnic identity. As in


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the quote above, “choice” is a valued criterion for religious authenticity(Williams and Vashi 2007:283–84).

Thus, at the same time that second- and third-generation young people aredefining themselves in distinction to their parents, they also define themselvesagainst a dominant American culture that is seen as either or both decidedlyChristian or secular. Often being counter-cultural involves distinguishingoneself from a context of “moral laxity.” This resonates with what our researchfound among evangelical Protestant youth and also among Hindu youngpeople. On several occasions I saw them present themselves as counter-culturalby emphasizing spiritual values and deriding materialist concerns.

Indeed, one could argue that one characteristic of American religious com-munities right now is that almost everyone thinks of themselves as part of aminority. High-status Episcopalians define themselves by their minority ethical–political positions, or reference the fact that Evangelicals seem to run thecountry. Evangelicals counter that they are under siege from cultural and mediaelites espousing relativism and secularism. There are many ways to be counter-cultural, and bolstered by a continuing exposure to religious education, manysecond-generation American Muslims are finding a way to do so effectively—bywhich I mean in ways that give them a sense of social and religious “place.”

For example, I was visiting an Islamic school that had both day-studentsand boarders, and was talking informally with several young men—ages about16–19. I asked them specifically about the challenges of trying to be Muslimin America. Again from my fieldnotes:

One of the students . . . at first denied that it was any problem at all, that the US has a greattradition of diversity and tolerance, and that one is free to follow any religion here. I reframeda bit to indicate I meant that American culture had many dimensions that are not compatiblewith Islam, and that as a country founded by Protestant Christians the US remains most“comfortable” (my term) for them.

With this all the students agreed heartily. They reported various degrees of knowing they weredifferent, of learning to negotiate that (one example—worrying about missing the bus for thehigh school soccer team’s trip to a game because he had to go pray). Having to be clear thatMuslims don’t drink or date, and how that can produce a great deal of tension. Several notedthat the challenge was in fact too much for many Muslim youth, and many were indeeddating, using drugs, not dressing modestly, etc.

In addition, all the students noted that they had some tension with their 1st generation parents(all four students were born here; all had parents born on the subcontinent). This, in theirview, had both a positive and negative aspect. The negative was that they were often intension with their parents over what they should be doing with their lives. They noted thatmany in the immigrant generation were so concerned with making it in America that theywere less concerned with religion and the like. At my distinction of “your parents are IndianMuslims living in America, you all are American Muslims” they gave vigorous assent.

The positive they saw [about being Muslim in the US] is that they are following a “purer” or“truer” Islam, unburdened with much of the cultural baggage that their parents and families


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have. Indeed, several seemed to indicate that their intense interest in religion and religious edu-cation put them at some odds with their more secular and assimilating parents.

About this time one of the teachers strolled up (a fairly young man). He reiterated that Islamin America was “liberated” (his word) from Arab and Indian culture. Thus the move to theUS was producing a purified form of the religion. When I commented that English NorthAmerica was founded by people coming here to establish a purer form of their religion, unpol-luted by their home culture, several students and the teacher voiced assent and one mentionedthat Muslims were in that American tradition.

Thus, being Muslim in America is a challenge (at one point the student who first denied itwas a problem said “I should recant what I said earlier, it is a challenge we face every day.”)but it is a challenge they should welcome religiously. The surrounding society gives them morechallenges to overcome to keep their religious selves pure, and they have the opportunity toproduce a truer Islam unbound by other traditional cultures.

In this excerpt are many of themes reported in this essay—the tensionwith parents, the development of counter-cultural identity even as they claimto be well within American traditions, and an active concern with negotiatingany American-Islam distance. I will give a summative word to the apt self-description offered by one of our respondents:

My mother says to me, “your outside may be American, but at heart you are Egyptian.” ButI say, “no, Ma, my icing may be Egyptian, but the cake is American.”

As a final illustration of the creative identity work being done by youngMuslim Americans, I reproduce below a painting by a Pakistani born artistAsma Ahmed Shikoh, titled “Self Portrait 1.” Ms. Shikoh moved from Karachito New York and now lives in New Jersey. She used the Statue of Libertybecause of its symbolic connections to immigration and new beginnings. Theimage is both iconically American and recognizably South Asian. The faceappears proud, perhaps just a bit defiant, and the expression certainly deter-mined. The features are bold and well defined, with eyes that are wide open, butalso have a hint of vigilance as they look into the middle distance. For me, it iswonderfully evocative of the American Islam currently emerging (figure 7).

THOUGHTS ON RELIGION, IDENTITY, AND PLACE

The foregoing has considered the development of an “American Islam” as aproduct of both “top down” and “bottom up” social processes. As non-Christianand fairly recent immigrants, most Muslims do not share a religious identity, aracial identity, or a cultural history with the non-Muslim and Muslim Americansalready here. They have encountered a society that officially separates religionfrom the state but venerates its place in civil society—a civil society organizedmore or less on a Protestant congregational model (Williams 2007). And both


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cultural imagery and recent events have made some native-born non-MuslimAmericans wary of these very developments. But Muslims in the United Stateshave adapted their religious organizations, and are doing significant cultural andidentity work, so that the second and third generations are producing a culturallyauthentic lived religion distinct from Christian America but also from the homecultures of immigrant Muslims.

The theoretical question for this essay is how to think about all of this interms of “place,” both as a geographic location and a social space. First, it isworth considering whether there is something particular about Islam and place.There are clear impulses within the faith toward “universalism,” and a type of“placelessness” is built deeply into the religious culture. The religious truth ofIslam is potentially available to all people everywhere—part of the missionaryand conversionist impulse that Islam has exhibited since its inception. Theummah, the Islamic community, is a universal concept that can be a religiousspace and sense of community as much as a geographic reality. Thus, “place” canbe constructed as something of an abstraction, or as primarily a social relation.

On the other hand, there are some distinct ways in which Islam isemplaced geographically. The hajj to Mecca is one of the five pillars of faith,and Muslims travel from around the world to that particular spot. Mecca, theKa’bah, the Dome of the Rock, and other sites considered holy are very partic-ular geographical locations, anchored in the faith narrative and elevated above

FIGURE 7. “Self Portrait 1” by Asma Shikoh, appears as part of “Self Portraits 1, 2, and 3” in the

series “Home” by Asma Ahmed Shikoh, 2004. Acrylic on Board, 24�30 inches. # Asma Ahmed

Shikoh; reproduction used by permission of the artist; asmashikoh.com.


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their materiality—even as they inhabit it. As Tweed (1997) puts it, these sitesare simultaneously “locative” and “trans-locative”—there is a distinct “there”there, and at the same time it takes the religious imagination and religiousidentity across times and places. This is particularly meaningful for a popula-tion that lives in diaspora.

Historically, these paired, if somewhat contradictory impulses—a universalreligion that supersedes the claims of clan, blood, territory, or political loyalty,and an emplaced faith born in Arab culture in particular cities with a notionof the religious community as a geographically located place—have given Islaman uneven relationship to the modern nation-state and religious pluralism. Thelegal interpretations and conceptual discourses vary. For some juridical tradi-tions, the dar-al-Islam (the “land of Islam”) is wherever Muslims are able tolive their religion freely, whether that place is Muslim majority or not—thedar-al-Islam and the ummah have no necessary geographical locations. Butother traditions have urged against Muslims living in non-Muslim lands, oramong nonbelievers, as the lack of Shar’iah is taken to be coterminous with thelack of a true Muslim community (Al-Alwani 2004; Khalidi 2004; McCloud2004). Not surprisingly, in contemporary writings on the issue, many of thetheorists interpreting the dar al-Islam liberally and more abstractly are them-selves residents in western diasporic lands, who live comfortably in pluralisticsocieties (Shepard 2009).

But if Islam has a particular set of responses to various issues of place, it ishardly the only religion for which place matters. After all, that place matters isa sociological cliche. But how does it matter, and how does that vary? Manypostmodernists would tell us that we live in an endlessly plastic world now—reality is virtual, identities are pastiches of individual agency, and social life isa bricolage of particularized constructions (see Williams 2005). On the otherhand, theorists of the “body” find all places to be resolutely local. Identity isembodied, intricately tied to the corporality of actual persons and their physi-cal beings. The attentions to place and to the body are not paired just in theiracademic trendiness. Place is often deeply intertwined with the body—peopleresonate with sights, smells, sounds, and the materiality of an actual location.We know that such things trigger memories and emotions. These work deeplyin making us who we are through the memories that form key elements of thenarratives we tell about our lives.

Religion is deeply enmeshed in that nexus of body and place through thesounds of the music, the smells of incense, or the vibrations one feels duringchants, harmonies, or from the rumble of the pipe organ.4 In my first experiencewith a Sufi Muslim group, I sat in the circle and listened to approximately 20

4Knott (2005) analyzes the relations between religion, location, and space through anexamination of the left hand in religion. Left hands are literal, emplaced parts of the body,but also occupy social spaces with religious meaning. Her spatial analysis is thus simultane-ously intertwining the physical and mental.


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people engage in a long chanting prayer. I watched for a while, trying to committo memory various ethnographic details. Eventually, I quit trying to think andobserve and just relaxed into the rhythms of the chanting, closing my eyes likethe participants. The effects were hypnotic. I could feel the vibrations of themale voices chanting, the rising and falling of the pitch, the interplay of thehard consonant sounds and smooth vowels. I had no ability to understandthe content—but I distinctly felt the physicality of the spiritual experience.

Moreover, bodily experience plays a central role in memory, and in theabsolutely critical importance of memory to shaping both personal and collec-tive identity. Given the centrality of memory to religion (Stier and Landres2006), it follows that religious identity and religious experience themselves aredeeply enmeshed in bodily experiences, and deeply placed by the location ofthose bodies and the attendant smells, sounds, sights, tastes, and touch.

Social geographers have taken another analytic step up in scale and havebeen writing recently on the geographical dimensions of religion; several, suchas Stump (2000), have engaged directly fundamentalist religion. They examinethe critical importance of sacred space as physical places, and the religious andoften political work that goes into protecting those places from defacement.They examine the attempt to control public space, particularly in contests withsecular institutions and institutional logics—contests fought in sites such asschools, town squares, and public media. Third, they have examined the spatialdimensions of the religious moral community and how often that is focused onphysical space, whether shutting the community off from polluting influencesor segregating genders in all religious activities.

A CURRENT CONTROVERSY

The very dynamics of geography, collective identity, and bodily and spatialproximity were on display in the summer and early fall of 2010 in the contro-versy regarding the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. A group of Muslims, whohave been having worship services in Lower Manhattan for years, have out-grown their current space and have proposed building an interfaith communitycenter that will include an Islamic prayer space on a site two blocks north ofwhere the World Trade Center (WTC) twin towers once stood. In effect, theywant to build the type of fully rounded community center that I referencedabove, but one augmented by specific programs designed to foster interfaithunderstanding. The center was to be called the Cordoba House (the groupraising the money and making the proposal called themselves the CordobaInitiative). The planned site has a standing structure, a former Burlington CoatFactory retail building. The existing building is not particularly significantarchitecturally or historically (the Landmarks Commission refused to protect itfrom destruction), except for the fact that the building was hit by airplanedebris on September 11, 2001—a part of a landing gear put a hole in the roof.


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The proposed new building would have none of the architectural features thatare commonly associated with Middle Eastern or South Asian mosques.

The plans were proceeding without too much difficulty, making it throughseveral of New York City’s various governing and regulations board easily—thelocal community board’s approval vote was 29–1. But some conservative politi-cians and activist community groups began to call the project a “mosque”(which then morphed into “mega-mosque”—presumably referencing its13-story blueprint) and claimed it is being built on or next to “Ground Zero”(meaning the former site of the WTC towers). They began to organize ralliesprotesting the plan. By August 2010, the protests and accompanying talk-showagitation dominated public stories. Some high-profile conservative politi-cians—most prominently former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich andformer Alaska governor Sarah Palin—kept the media attention on the issue.Given that August is a slow period for national news media as Congress is outof session, and it was the beginning of the 2010 mid-term Congressional elec-tion season, the media attention was considerable.

This was a dramatic example of how a place becomes infused withmeaning and that in turn shapes social action. All of the reactions to the 9/11attacks—the fear, the horror, then the veneration of the fallen, the rage anddesire for revenge—bubbled up to the surface again, and the protests againstthe project resonated with significant numbers of Americans. In denselypacked Lower Manhattan, one cannot see the WTC site from the proposed siteor vice versa; it is certainly not “on” Ground Zero, nor will the new buildingbe able to cast a physical “shadow” on that site. But the WTC space now hasthe aura and language of the sacred for many Americans. Some opponents ofthe project call the Islamic Center plan a “desecration.” Even many who donot oppose the project often refer to the WTC as “hallowed” or “HolyGround.”5 A specific geographic place merged with a social space of religiousidentification (both the religious identity of the attack’s perpetrators and thecivil religious identity of the American nation) to produce for many people adeep emotional reaction to the proposal.

Other arguments made either for or against the project are also interestingfor a more self-conscious sociology of place. One claim is that there is tremen-dous importance in the initial designation of the project as “Cordoba House.”Cordoba, Spain, was the seat of the Caliphate during al-Andalus, the period ofIslamic Spain. Critics see the name as a symbol of a land being conquered, andrecall that the Moors turned the Cathedral in Cordoba into a mosque. Indeed,many claim that it is a distinctive and particularly Islamic practice to build a

5One interesting aspect of the controversy has been the veneration of New York City,as a place, by people who before 9/11 and often afterward have had little positive to sayabout it. Conservatives often treat New York City as the apotheosis of “the other” and allthat is non-American—an international city with liberal attitudes, the home to mediaelites, and full of immigrants from around the world. And yet the WTC is sacred ground.


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mosque on a holy site of a conquered territory, literally “emplacing” the victo-rious religion in a territory. In contrast, others noted that Moorish Cordobawas a seat of learning and great literary and artistic achievement—and that itwas by medieval European standards a citadel of religious tolerance forChristians and Jews as well as Muslims (ignored in all of this was that afterFernando and Isabella’s reconquista of Spain the mosque was re-configured intoa Catholic cathedral—and all of this was on a site that had Roman andVisigoth religious ruins as well).

Another claim—first made very public by Newt Gingrich—is that amosque would be acceptable in Lower Manhattan when they allow the buildingof churches in Saudi Arabia. A Gingrich fund-raising letter decries this as a“double standard” that should be opposed and the idea made it into streetprotest signs. This claim posits American identity as a place, or the territory ofa tribe (see Jacobson 2002), not as a set of principles or shared value that dis-tinguishes the nation from the rest of the world. The claim directly emplacesreligion, identity, and nation, and uses that locative nexus as the basis forsocial exclusion. Other opponents conceded that Muslims have the right tobuild a mosque and that Americans should tolerate such diversity, but felt thatthe Park Avenue building was too close to the WTC site. Many of those offer-ing such a response had difficulty defining how much distance would in fact beappropriate. Implied in this reaction is that the geographic place of the WTCneeds a bubble of sacred space, again finding a deeply emotional connectionbetween the sacred and a specific location.6

Clearly this physical location, and the city in which it exists, has beeninvested with new meaning, based on a violent, collective event. Anti-mosquesentiment and protests have since appeared in other parts of the country—including in Brooklyn, in Tennessee, and in Southern California. In each case,it is the publicness and the materiality of the construction of a new buildingthat seems to ignite the protest. Muslims have been in these places withoutincident for years. The new mosques are symbols, but they are real physicalentities as well—bringing issues of cultural change, religious diversity, and reli-gious conflict, into such a sharp relief that they cannot be ignored.

PLACE IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

In sociological terms, any given location only becomes a “place” when itbecomes invested with meaning and value. In Gieryn’s (2000) influentialarticle “A Space for Place in Sociology,” he argues that for something to be a

6I thank Frank Lechner for observing to me the depth of the emotional connectionsapparent in these reactions, and the importance of understanding that depth to my theoret-ical claims, whatever my own political commitments.


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place sociologically it must have three constituent features: (1) a geographiclocation—meaning a finitude and boundaries that locate something some-where; (2) material form or physicality; and (3) investment with meaning andvalue.

Religion often and clearly plays a key role in the investment of meaningand value, and we can learn a great deal about “emplacing” through studyingreligious places—how ritual produces sacred physical as well as sacred cosmicspace, how narratives may give a place an important role in the work of theDivine (see Neitz 2005), or how memory connects identity as God’s peoplewith locations in this world (see Lane 2001). Physical place is often infusedwith meanings that relate to the Divine, and powerfully motivate social action.Place is prominent in the literature on collective memory, whether thoseplaces be territories, monuments to events, features of the natural world, oraspects of the built environment that were constructed for one task but thatbecome meaningfully reappropriated. This can also be true of elements of thenatural world, as they emplace us in the cosmos in a way that seems natural,appropriate, and timeless (Schama 1995). But as the site of the former TwinTowers shows us, it is not limited to the natural.

The extent to which collective memory is critical to collective identityis also well considered by social scientists (e.g., Stier and Landres 2006).Stories that are told, remembered, re-created, shared, and incorporated intoa collective narrative, are deeply part of who we are, as well as who weare not. They connect us in space and in time, to the past and the future;we are connected to a place—a homeland as territory—or to a “home”that may not be a literal physical place but can only be expressed bymetaphors that treat it as if it is.

That logical syllogism, from place to collective memory to collective iden-tity, makes clear sense and our theoretical tools can engage it. In sociologicalshort-hand, we might think of religion being an exogenous “independent” vari-able actively shaping the meaning and the actions that people take towardplaces in the world. But we should also try to understand the extent that placeitself has what could be called its own “direct effects” on identity and religion.These are situations in which place may be the “independent variable,”shaping religious thought and action. Some of these effects may be things thatactors themselves do not fully realize, in the same way that gender can shapesocial action without actors always being aware of it in any self-conscious orcritical matter. This would include asking how religious identities—both indi-vidual and collective—become what they are in part because of the social andphysical places in which people enact their lives. How is it that place couldmatter, and how should we go about investigating that?

While this is a general question, it is distinctly apropos for my concernwith Muslims in the United States and the creation of an American Islam.The extent to which social space and physical environment are intertwined isperhaps most observable in immigrant populations, especially immigrant


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communities in urban settings. If anyone knows that “place matters” it is immi-grants, who are faced with both preserving and creating religion and practicallives in a new cultural and physical context.

Significantly, I believe, this religious and cultural work is happening mostnotably in cities. Urban spaces are both geographical and social, and bothdimensions shape the religious expressions of the people who live within them(Williams 2002, 2006). Cities are what they are by nature of the density of thepopulations who live in them. People are geographically constrained and inphysical proximity to each other, they interact with other people and other“types” of people many times every day. Many cities have areas that are moreor less villages; they are residentially dominated by one group—the food avail-able, the music coming out of windows, the language one hears on the street,in the churches, and inside the homes is relatively homogenous. But onecannot venture far without encountering others, whether at work or on thestreet, in public transportation, or in the public schools. The inevitability ofencounter is one of the reasons that fundamentalism was spawned by themodern city, but has often had trouble flourishing there (Williams 2011). Anddeeply traditionalist faiths, those that hope to freeze a moment in time such asthe Old Order Amish (or the Mormons in the nineteenth century) must try todo so in more rural areas.

Geographic envelopment creates a particular type of social space, whileencounters with others create another kind. Physical boundaries are oftensymbolic, but it is at just such points where the geographic and the socialdimensions of place intersect (Williams 2004). Negotiation, understanding,prejudice, and cultural sharing all occur. Gieryn (2000) notes that proximity,in the form of face-to-face contact, can produce either engagement or estrange-ment. We see both responses in the religions that emerge in multireligiouscities. Cities are sites of tremendous religious syncretism and tolerance, butsimultaneously can produce intense desires for religious purity and culturalwithdrawal. Proximity to others produces a reaction that creates the “other” asa social distinction. Often this is a matter of theology, or of the details of ritualpractice, or race or class differences. But the visual matters as well. One cannotavoid everyday encounters that require a response. This increases the impor-tance of symbolic boundaries and the denial of polluting influences. But thedenial itself is a powerful shaping mechanism—avoidance takes work.

Part of what makes cities distinct is the sheer number of people who canbe gathered together—it matters when there are enough people that ever-finergradations of identity can form a group. So in cities such as St. Louis, there isonly one Hindu temple, with altars in it for a number of different deities. Butin Jackson Heights in Queens, it isn’t necessary for different devotional groupsto mix; the large Indian community can internally differentiate. Chicago hasan Ismaili Center for that small sectarian group of Shi’ite Muslims—while inCincinnati there are three Islamic Centers serving the entire new immigrantcommunity, but they by necessity all take a ‘big tent’ approach. In this regard,


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college campuses have some physical similarities to cities. There is density,there is diversity, and there is a set of cultural pragmatics that requiresbetween-group contact, even as it may foster within-group solidarity. To saythat American Islam began on college campuses is partly a statement aboutgeneration, but I think it is also a statement about the geographic reality ofuniversities. Again, place matters.

Both the syncretism and the impulse toward purity in cities are partlya function of population, density, and encounter. Cities draw people,people find each other, and in the process borrow, adapt, and react to themany others who are there. Given the range of what we call “cities” or“urban spaces,” we need to investigate how that variation works. How isthe American Islam that is being created in New York, or Chicago, dis-tinct from that happening in “donut cities” such as Detroit, or Cleveland?How does the urban sprawl of Los Angeles or Houston—where one canoften drive over neighborhoods without direct contact—affect the dynamicsof cultural sharing or shunning?

There is a deeply entwined relationship between meaning and materiality.For the physicality of place to be sociologically interesting, it must be investedwith meaning. But meaning must have a site about which identity, emotion,ritual, and memory can be “located”—the materiality matters. The transforma-tion of huge buildings into a huge crater in Manhattan was powerful, irrespec-tive of the tragic loss of life. The appearance on the street of people publiclydisplaying their religious identity must be noticed, and can only be overlookedby incorporating it into the routine and normal. Our religious identities comewith places just as they come with bodies—even when we culturally createthem or re-create them primarily through metaphor. Place is a dimension ofthe contexts in which religion is enacted and experienced. Investigating it sys-tematically can only enrich our understanding of the dynamics of religion inthe contemporary world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A portion of this address was given as a presentation to the Department ofSociology and the Duke Islamic Studies Center at Duke University in February2010. I thank the participants in that colloquium for their feedback. The paperwas also subject of a discussion session of the Sociology of Religion WorkingGroup in the McNamara Center for the Social Study of Religion at LoyolaUniversity. The feedback there was very valuable. In addition, I thank LoriBeaman, Mark Chaves, Janet Jacobs, Fred Kniss, Kelly Moore, and SteveWarner for discussions and exchanges that helped develop the ideas presentedhere.


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FUNDING

The Lilly Endowment, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, supported the ethnographicresearch reported here.

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